


Wherever We Have Gone

by sultrybutdamaged



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Canon Temporary Character Death, F/M, Found Family, Implied Pairings, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Series Finale, Shipper's Choice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:01:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23436556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sultrybutdamaged/pseuds/sultrybutdamaged
Summary: Some things end.  Others begin.
Relationships: 23rd Timeline William "Penny" Adiyodi/Julia Wicker, Fen/Margo Hanson/Josh Hoberman, Kady Orloff-Diaz & Alice Quinn, Margo Hanson & Eliot Waugh, Margo Hanson/Josh Hoberman, Quentin Coldwater & Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater/Alice Quinn, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Kady Orloff-Diaz
Comments: 12
Kudos: 64





	Wherever We Have Gone

**Author's Note:**

> This fic started life as the final chapter of a post-Season Four "Penny and Quentin in the Underworld" story that I never finished. Since canon ended up pretty close to what I had planned for the non-dead characters, I've revised it to be as close to what's happening in Season Five as possible and am squeezing it in just ahead of tonight's finale. I couldn't cover all the dangling threads from canon, so just assume things like Julia's psychic baby situation and the Dark King got resolved before this began.
> 
> I don't think we'll be getting anything like this in tonight's finale, even if the hopeful part of me thinks they could hint at an idea like this. If not, that's what fic is for.
> 
> This story is unbeta'd to get it finished before the finale. All mistakes are mine.

_He spun the card in his hand, flipping it through his fingers like the coins he’d once used to hide his nervous twitches. It was an ordinary thing, plastic to the touch, exactly like the one he’d carried in his wallet half his life, since his parents had first allowed him out into the city on his own. But this one was going to take him a lot further than Jersey._

_Across the room, he could feel the weight of Penny’s gaze. He didn’t remember Penny ever having that kind of power in his stare, but maybe it was being dead that did it._

_“Are you sure about this?” he asked._

_“Yeah, of course.” He made himself set the card down on his knee and rubbed his palms against his jeans. “I just - why me?”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“You said it sometimes takes people years. Why do I get to move on?”_

_“Because you’re ready.”_

***

“That can’t be - that’s not possible!” Alice had stayed calm until this point, but now her voice was growing higher and sharper in pitch as she began to freak out. Kady had become accustomed to the signs. 

“I think it’s - “ Julia riffled through her notes on the World Seed Translation, a frown between her eyebrows. 

“It doesn’t make sense.” Alice’s heels clicked sharply as she stalked back across the lab to her own stack of books and papers. “I know we had the metamath worked out correctly and the circumstances - “

“The circumstances were fine.”

“Of course they were fine! We’re here.”Alice gestured around at the Brakebills lab. “But obviously something went wrong.”

“I don’t think it did,” Julia murmured.

“ _That’s_ not wrong?” 

The three of them turned to follow the path of Alice’s flailing hand to the clock, jarringly out of place with its old-world shabby grandeur beside the student desks and instruments of the lab. The clock looked like it had since Kady had first encountered it, years ago back at the Physical Kids’ cottage, only now its doors were flung open and instead of the fresh air and green forests and chirping, tweeting, sonnet-reciting clamor of Fillory’s whimsical forests, there was - nothing.

A blank. Not even a void or a blackness, just nothing. Kady’s eyes slid away when she tried to look at it.

“That’s not Fillory.” The tremor in Alice’s voice surprised her. Kady found the emptiness eerie and a little sickening, like staring too long at an optical illusion, but Alice sounded like she was about to cry. Kady wouldn’t have thought Alice had enough happy memories of Fillory to mourn its passing that much.

_Maybe because Fillory was_ his _, to her,_ she mused. _And if it’s gone, then he’s gone too._

Silly, maybe, but Kady was in no position to tell other people how to grieve.

She watched sympathetically as Alice stalked back over to the clock and planted herself in front of it, feet apart and shoulders squared in the posture she always took when she was about to do some serious casting. Her fingers moved too rapidly for Kady to follow the tuts, tracing shimmering gold sigils across the face of the clock. Kady shot a look at Julia, but the other girl only watched Alice closely, one hand absently holding her pregnant belly.

Alice finished her spell and her shoulders slumped. “Nothing’s working,” she said. “It’s not like anything is blocking the portal, it’s just - “

It was her hopeless voice more than any real thought that she could make a difference that made Kady push off the table she’s been perched on and say, “Want me to take a shot?” Alice turned to look at her, all downturned eyebrows and confusion, and Kady forced a cocky grin.“You guys tried all that fancy, higher-math spell work.I was thinking of something a little more primal.”

Alice smiled a little. “You sell yourself short,” she said quietly. 

Kady knew she was a damned good magician, even if she’d only lasted a semester at Brakebills and didn’t have Alice’s brilliance or Julia’s incredible instincts. But it was still nice to hear it.“Here we go,” she said, and lined up the spell.

Battle magic was about more than just blasting everything in sight, at least if you did it the way Kady had learned as a child. It was breath, focus, total concentration until you were one with your target.Kady narrowed her eyes at the nothingness between the clock doors that kept trying to turn her eyes away, forced herself to really see it, then took aim. The spell surged up through her whole body and flew true, smashing through the doors without so much as chipping the clock itself.

Absolutely nothing else happened.

After a minute, Kady let out a breath and shook out her shoulders. “What’s Plan C?”

“Maybe the problem is the clock,” Alice said, in the vague tone that meant her mind was already flying ahead of this conversation, riffling through the accumulated spells in her brain for a solution. “It was in the room with us, and so it could have been impacted by the spell.We may need to realign it with - or maybe we should check another path off-world, see if the Neitherlands can still access Fillory. I can contact Zelda - “

Then Julia said, quietly, “Fillory’s gone.” 

Even Kady jumped a little at that, but Julia held up a hand before she could say anything, or Alice could completely fall apart. “Not destroyed. The spell worked.I… felt it.”Julia always talked about magic like that now, like it was more than just spells, like there was something intrinsic about it that she could sense. Another time Kady might have tried to tease her a little about her “goddess woo-woo” - they were getting to the point where teasing felt natural again - but Alice pounced before she could say anything.

“Then what do you mean it’s gone? The whole point was to save it, and if we saved it - “

“We saved it.” Julia spoke with such confidence that even Alice closed her mouth. “But we also… sacrificed it, I guess you could say.”For the first time in several minutes, she seemed to focus on Alice standing in front of her, and smiled a little sadly. “We knew the spell required a sacrifice.”

“Well, sure, we divided the Wellspring across the worlds, but there’s still enough - “

“A personal sacrifice,” Julia said. “I think, to protect and preserve Fillory, we had to give it up.”

Kady turned back to the clock, feeling the first tendrils of something a little like loss, if not for Fillory itself. “The portals won’t work,” she said. 

“I don’t think they will,” Julia said. “None of them on Earth, and maybe… maybe not anywhere. Not to get to Fillory.It’s gone.”

_Gone_. 

“And the people?” Alice asked, very quietly.

“The people of Fillory are free to live without Children of Earth constantly screwing with them, or thinking we know better than they do how to help them,” Julia said. “Fen was right about that much.”

But Kady knew those weren’t the people Alice was thinking of, and Julia knew that too. She dropped her eyes as Alice said, “What about Eliot and Margo and Josh?Even Fen was part of the spell. What happens to them?”

“I - “

“You don’t know.” For a minute, Kady thought Alice was going to snap. But then she took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them her emotions were back in check. “Of course you don’t know.This is an entirely unique situation.We won’t be able to rely much on existing research, but still, there may be something in the books on traveling between worlds that we could - “

“Alice,” Julia said. “It - none of it will work. No matter how much magic we have, we can’t reach Fillory.”

“All of us did the spell, Julia.” Alice’s voice was very calm and she was turning the pages in one of her books at a careful, measured pace, but Kady could hear the tension in her voice. “Us here, and them there.All of us must have sacrificed Fillory.So what happens to them, when they were _in_ Fillory?”

“Maybe they gave up Earth, instead,” Kady said. The others turned to look at her, both of them with those _I-can-see-right-through-you_ looks that they’d hate to know they shared. “Well, think about it.If we gave up Fillory on behalf of Earth, maybe they gave up Earth on behalf of Fillory.”

It didn’t feel right, though. She knew that as soon as she said it. That wasn’t how sacrifices worked. 

“Maybe,” Julia said, but Kady could hear the same doubt in her voice.

“We need to find out. If they’re in Fillory and they’re fine, just living out their lives going to bars with animals in them and fighting off endless royal coups, then… then okay. But we need to make sure.If Fillory’s going to reject them, somehow, we can’t just leave them to - I can’t leave him - “Alice bit her lip and looked down at her books, and Kady heard her say, so softly she probably didn’t mean for them to hear, “Q would hate me if I did that.”

For the first time since the spell had gone off, Julia’s ex-goddess calm wavered. “Alice,” she said, and went to stand next to the other girl, a hand on her arm. Alice’s shoulders stiffened for a long moment, then relaxed. 

“Okay,” Julia said. “Okay, we’ll look.”And without another word, she pulled over a stack of books and began to read.

Kady stood awkwardly in the corner, wondering if she should join them or if this was a private moment, until the door slammed open.

“Well, I guess talking to Dean Fogg is always going to be a bizarre experience from here on,” Penny said. He stepped a few feet into the room, on a beeline for Julia like always, then paused, frowning as he caught sight of the clock. “And that is… also bizarre.”He stared around at them, looking for an explanation.“I left for five minutes.What did you do?”

“We opened the doors,” Kady said dryly. “Turns out, we can’t walk through anymore.”

“We’re cut off from Fillory,” Julia explained. “Everyone might be.”

Penny got there a lot faster than the rest of them had. “Even - “

Julia shot a look at Alice, now rapidly turning pages in her books with a frantic edge to her movements. “We don’t know.”

Alice slammed a book shut. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“No, it won’t.”

This time it was Dean Fogg in the lab door. Kady smiled at the sight of him, like she might have at a favorite uncle, if she’d ever had any of those. Henry looked almost like his old self, though since his return from the Etherochrome, his fashion sense had taken a turn for the flowery and bright. (“But you still wear a scarf best,” Kady had overheard Julia assure Penny.)But it was the expression on the Dean’s face that had changed.For as long as she’d known him, Henry Fogg had seemed like a man who couldn’t be surprised or disappointed after forty timelines of tragedy. Now there was an innocence to his expression, the sense of a man looking at a world that was entirely new and full of possibility.

Even now, examining the nothingness beyond the clock and assuring them that their friends were gone, Henry looked delighted. “It’s never been done before, you know,” he said.“Channeling the magic of an entire world to save it.I never thought I’d say this, but you’ve all, dare I say, impressed me.” 

“Yeah, well, it came with a cost,” Julia said.

“Yes,” Henry agreed. “I never did get a chance to meet a talking sloth. Always thought they sounded like wonderful conversationalists.”

“We’re talking about our friends,” Alice snapped.

“Ah. Them.” Henry nodded pleasantly, like she was speaking of people who’d just stepped out of the room. “Did you know that the Etherochrome penetrates all realms?”

“Including Fillory?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not relevant to this discussion.” Alice opened her mouth, but he rambled on heedlessly.“I refer to the Underworld. I took a fascinating wander there, and I met an old friend of yours.”He met Kady’s eyes, his smile gentle as he held out a folded piece of paper. “He gave me this.”

It felt like regular paper in her fingers - the nice kind, the kind you got at fancy offices where people wore suits like the Librarians. Kady’s fingers shook as she unfolded it and read the contents.

After a few minutes, she blinked and cleared her throat. “It’s, um, it’s from Penny.My Penny.”The others had obviously figured that out, but they stayed quiet, giving her a moment to scan the words again, to soak in Penny’s messy scrawl and familiar phrasing, before she flipped to the back of the page. “They’re coordinates,” she said finally.“But I don’t think, um… I can’t read them.I think maybe there’s an extra bit?Latitude, longitude and something else.”

“Traveler coordinates,” this Penny, the current Penny, said. He took a step closer and held out his hand.“Is it okay if I - ?” He paused.“I’ll only look at the numbers.That’s why he put them on the back. So you could keep the rest private.”

It was eerie, like always, the way he understood his other self and yet wasn’t him.

She hesitated, then handed over the page, staring at it with a bizarre feeling of jealousy as he smoothed it with his fingers. “Okay, yeah, Traveler coordinates,” he said.“The third symbol marks the world, but I don’t recognize that one. Actually, I don’t - uh - “

“What?” Julia had come to look over his shoulder. “What is that?”

“A world I’ve never heard of.”

“A new world,” Henry intoned, then added, when they all turned to stare at him, “or an old one that we forgot about because the Library doesn’t know as much as they’d like us to think. It’s impossible to tell.Enjoy your explorations.I suggest packing extra socks.”

“Wait, what?” Penny stared at him. “You think we’re going to this place?”

Henry blinked at him peacefully. “Aren’t you?” 

“No…” Penny looked between the three girls. “No.Right?”

“I mean…” Julia stared at the symbols, conflicted. “It doesn’t really make sense that they’d…”

“We should check with Zelda, see if she knows anything about this world,” Alice said, but she, too, stared at the page like it was compelling her. Kady understood the feeling.

“We’re going,” she said. “Right now.”

“Oh, we are?” Penny raised his eyebrows. “You remember that my Traveling has no GPS, right?”

“I’m sure young Miss Chatwin would volunteer to assist,” Henry said. “She seems like the adventurous sort.”

“She seems like a student!” Penny snapped. “You’re not supposed to encourage the students to… oh, never mind.” He turned to Julia.“We can’t. _You_ can’t - “

“The baby will be fine,” Julia said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, though.” Julia looked back at the coordinates and began to smile. Kady could feel that smile echo something inside her, some inexplicable confidence that they were doing the right thing. Alice wore the same expression, and even Penny nodded finally, the worry on his face fading. 

“Alright, fine,” he said. “I’ll go find Plum and see if she wants to play tour bus.”

“Where do you think we’re going?” Alice asked Kady as he left the room. Julia had gone back to studying the numbers with that wistful expression she got around magic, Henry murmuring to her quietly over them. 

“I have no idea,” Kady admitted. “But I think our friends will be there.”

“That makes no sense,” Alice said, but she was grinning, and Kady knew she felt it too. 

“No,” Kady agreed, and fingered the paper again.

Not just their friends, she thought, thinking of the last lines Penny had written.

_I’ll see you soon._

***

_“Everyone’s carrying baggage with them when they die,” Penny explained. “And the Underworld, this part of it anyway, it’s where you go to work that baggage out. Let go of the regrets and the pain.And once you reach that point, you’re ready to move on.”_

_“Uh-huh.” He looked down at the card again, his get-out-of-the-Underworld-free card, this symbol of how much he’d apparently let go. Then he looked back at Penny.“That’s a great speech.Do you really believe a word of it?”_

_“What?” For the first time, he could see his hostile first year roommate in the corporate automaton-slash-grief counselor across the room._

_“Come on,” he said. “You can’t say that the Metrocard goes to people who have let go of their regrets and then give it to me. Why, because you showed me my own funeral?Showed me all of them crying and trying to say goodbye, when we know that’s not - you think I don’t have regrets after that?”_

_“Do you?”_

_“So many.” He could barely breathe around them._

_Penny sighed deeply, looking distressed. His gaze wandered away, across the dull, featureless office, like he was coming to a decision. “It’s a speech we learn,” he said finally. “I have no idea what’s really beyond those doors, man.”_

_“Great.” He slumped back on the couch._

_“Or, well… maybe one idea.” Penny bit his lip, studying him for a long moment. “I heard something once, about those cards.From someone I think was telling the truth.”_

_“And what did they say?”_

_“They said, the card takes you where you’re supposed to be.”_

***

“What do you think that one is?” Fen asked.

“Uh…” Josh squinted up at the swirling clouds. “A giraffe?”

“What about that one?”

“A kitchen sink.”

“That one?”

“A fork?” The wisp of cloud solidified as it drifted down, landing in Josh’s hand. “Yep, a fork.”

“Huh.” Fen took it, studied it for a moment, then tossed it over her shoulder, where it dissolved back into fluffy white cloud-stuff as it hit the sand before vanishing. “What about that one?”

Margo stared after Fen and Josh, wandering across the desert several yards in front of them, then leaned in closer to Eliot. “I have a question,” she said.“How long am I going to have to listen to her ask about every damned thing that falls out of the sky before I’m allowed to take a swing?”

“You have to admit, it is strange,” Eliot said. He tilted his head back to study the gentle rain of animals, plants and random household objects forming in the clouds and falling down around them, most of them dissipating before they hit the ground. “I thought creating a new world would be more… I don’t know.Big bang-ish, you know?Explosions.Evolution.Not just… this.”

“You thought we were going to _explode_ and you still threw the World Seed into the spell?”

He shrugged. “It seemed like the thing to do.”

Margo gave him a suspicious look. If there was one of them she’d expect to be sanguine about wandering through a desert with no end in sight and a world forming itself in no particular order and falling out of the sky, it wasn’t Eliot. But her best friend had a look of contentment on his face as they walked, like they were on their way to a Sunday brunch with extra-strong mimosas. 

“Why are you so happy?” she asked.

He turned that calm smile on her. “Why wouldn’t I be?We saved Fillory, we all survived…” He threw an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against his side. “I have my Bambi.What else do I need?”

“A… destination, maybe?” Margo letting him hug her, though, winding her own arm around his waist. “Some sense of civilization?”

“It’s a brand new world, I doubt they’ve got champagne and caviar yet.”

“You know I hate caviar. But seriously, El.”She twisted her neck to look up at him. “I’d like a fucking clue about what’s happening.”

“That part’s easy. We saved Fillory and in return she kicked us out.”

Margo remembered that part. There had been a moment just before the spell snapped into place, when she was tutting in perfect time with Eliot and Josh, and feeling the matching movements from their friends back at Brakebills, and all the other magicians connected through them all over the multiverse, the hedges and the Librarians and those weird Lorian guys with the wands, when Margo had felt _magical_ in a way that had never happened before. Like she was holding the center of the universe in her own body and feeling it move. Like she was part of something.

And then the spell had snapped into place, Fillory surging to life around them, all the damage the dead had caused gone - and she’d felt, in her bones, the land itself say _no_.

Not to the magic. Not to the healing. But to her.

She’d seen the looks on Eliot and Josh’s faces, the same shock and feeling of rejection. She’d seen Fen’s horror - Fen who’d fought for her homeland and was now being cast out, Fen who couldn’t feel the magic but somehow still knew, because her blood was part of the spell, the blood of someone who loved Fillory as it was to match the blood of someone who loved it as it should be. There had been a brief, panicked thought - _but where do we go if we aren’t here?_ \- and then Eliot had thrown the World Seed into the center of the spell and everything had gone white.

And now the four of them were here. In a desert that was, hopefully, not going to stay a desert for long.

“Go easy on Fen,” Eliot said, watching his - ex-wife? Getting exiled from the planet where your marriage was recorded had to count as a divorce - wander along ahead of them, chattering away to Josh. “She’s lost more than the rest of us.”

But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Fen didn’t look lost.She seemed perfectly happy, busily identifying clouds, just like Eliot seemed happy to spend forever in this desert with no end in sight.

“It’s very obvious that none of you have ever tried to cross a desert before,” Margo said. “And this time I’m not even hallucinating.”

“I can sing for you anyway, if you’d like?” Eliot grinned down at her and Margo had to smile back. 

“It’s not the same without the outfit.”

“Too bad I didn’t have any warning or I would have packed something.” He paused, and Margo stopped with him, looking up at him as he scanned the area around them, just endless flat sand. “I will say, as much as I am enjoying this uncharacteristic feeling of peace - “

“Yeah, and what the fuck is that about?”

“New beginnings, Bambi.” When he smiled, he finally looked like _her_ Eliot, not the weird zen creature he’d been since he picked up the World Seed. There were hints of old sadness and grief and sardonic humor around his eyes.“For the first time, we can just… completely start over. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

_It sounds like I lost my fucking kingdom, again,_ she wanted to say, but she could feel it too. Beneath the confusion, and the irritation _about_ the confusion, and the loss, there was the conviction that this was right. They were where they needed to be.

Margo hated destiny bullshit.

“But as nice as it is to think we aren’t on the edge of an apocalypse for once,” Eliot went on, “I do wish we’d thought to bring along that Ark Umber was so fond of. I wouldn’t mind a ride.”

“What about that?”

Margo turned, about to snap at Fen that everything falling from the sky was perfectly identifiable to anyone with the brain of a four year-old - and then she saw what Fen was pointing at, and stilled.

It was huge, as large as a building but mobile. And it wasn’t floating, though it moved so smoothly over the sand towards them that it wasn’t obvious right away that it was on land. 

“What the hell?” Josh asked. He turned to give her and Eliot a nervous look. “Should we be… running?Screaming? Playing dead?”

“No,” Margo said. She took a step forward and then another, passing Josh and Fen as she crossed the desert towards the approaching creature. She wasn’t thinking anymore about her lost kingdom, or their hopeless situation, or how annoying it was to have magic trying to tell her what to _feel_.

She was remembering being six years old, curled up on her grandmother’s lap, opening the first of the Fillory books and entering the adventures of the Chatwins in a magical land.

“Ah,” Eliot said behind her. “I think that’s our ride.”

***

_“That’s easy,” he said. “I’m supposed to be back there.”_

_“No,” Penny said. “Sorry, but that’s not possible. No one gets to go back.”_

_“But then what the hell is the point of the question? There’s nowhere else I’m supposed to be.”_

_“But there must be.” Penny sounded more animated now that he wasn’t trying to pretend he knew what was going on. He leaned forward on his knees, eyes intense.“Come on, think about it.Where, more than anywhere else, do you belong?”_

Fillory _. It had been the answer for so long, of course it was the first thing to come to mind. Fillory, the world that was supposed to make him fit, supposed to make him matter.Supposed to make him better._

_Clearly that hadn’t worked out._

_And Fillory wasn’t the answer, he knew that. His journey to the Secret Sea had taught him that much. Whatever he’d wanted Fillory to be, it had been that in his childhood, in his imagination, but the real place was something different._

_“I’m not sure I’ve ever known the answer to that question,” he admitted._

_“Yes, you do,” Penny said. “I remember you as a first year at Brakebills. You threw battle magic at me because I almost got you kicked out of that place. You knew where you belonged then.”_

_“Yeah, but Brakebills is on - “ But it hadn’t been about Brakebills, had it?_

You are not alone here, _Eliot had said. And it had been true._

_Brakebills, yes, studying in that library with Alice across the table or curled on the couch at the end of a party with Eliot and Margo passed out to either side, but that hadn’t been the only place, had it? There had been space beneath a coffee table, in a living room on the Upper West Side.A fantasy castle with four thrones.A tiny cottage with a giant puzzle in its front yard and a child’s toys scattered among the pieces._

_“Them,” he said. “That’s where I belong. With them.”_

_“Yeah,” Penny said, and sighed. “Yeah, trust me, I get that.That’s the problem.”_

***

“It’s the Cozy Horse,” Alice explained. She was perched as far from the horse’s head as she could get and still be close enough to hear them, and she kept nervously eyeing its teeth. “I saw it before, when I was a niffin.I wasn’t the nicest, to it.”She sighed.“Which sucks, because this should have been a lot of fun.I love horses.”

“What did you do to it?” Plum asked. The young Traveler had apparently also been a horse girl, and she looked ready to throw down if Alice made the wrong move towards the creature.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m sure it understands,” Penny said from his seat much closer to the creature’s neck, where he was providing a backrest for Julia. “I mean, you’re not all blue and on fire anymore, right?So it probably doesn’t even recognize you.”

The Cozy Horse made a snorting sound, the effect like a roll of thunder. Alice flinched.

“My question is, how do we know we were supposed to get on this thing?” Kady asked. She sounded suspicious - or actually, Julia thought, she sounded like she was trying really hard to be suspicious, the way the Kady of before would have been suspicious about taking a ride on a creature a hundred feet tall. Julia knew she wasn’t really feeling that old fear, though.How could she be? _The Cozy Horse._

She ran one hand over its velvety smooth back, grinning.

“It was waiting for us when we got here,” Plum said. “At the exact coordinates you gave me.”

“And that’s enough for you?”

The others all shared looks. “Yes,” they said, in unison.

Kady sighed, then flopped back across the horse’s back. There was plenty of room for them to all stretch out and not crowd each other. “Yeah, alright,” she said.“This is insane, but what isn’t now?”

It wasn’t insane, though, Julia thought. It was perfect. 

She slipped away from Penny and stretched out as gracefully as she could on her side, cradling her belly with one hand while she stroked the horse’s neck with the other. The Cozy Horse’s gait was nothing like the horses she’d ridden as a child; it felt more like they were floating along on the world’s largest, most comfortable bed.

_I wish you could see this, Q,_ she thought, but for the first time in months, the thought of Quentin didn’t hurt.

She must have drifted off to sleep, because the next thing she knew, Penny was shaking her shoulder. “I think we’re here,” he said.“Wherever that is.”

The horse came to a halt and slowly lowered itself to the ground so its passengers could slide off, though Julia needed Penny and Kady to half-lift her between them to get down. Julia hung back for a moment to give the horse a last pat, noticing Plum practically nuzzling its enormous face and even Alice smiling as she stroked its ears.She pulled away reluctantly, relieved that the horse seemed to be settling in for a rest. Maybe they’d get a chance for another ride.

“So… where’s here?” she asked. 

They were standing on the edge of a vast desert, under a sky thick with soft, fluffy, very un-desert like clouds. Far away in the distance, Julia thought she could see rain - though the drops were unusually large and irregular - but in the area where they stood, the desert had begun to give way to vegetation, rich green grass and brilliant flowers in exotic shapes and colors. A narrow path of flat stones ran through the grass, leading up to a gate surrounded by the thick growth of a maze. Beyond the maze, she could see improbable fruit trees growing.

“I guess one of you is going to say we’re supposed to go through that gate, because it just happens to be here,” Kady said, but she sounded more amused than anything else.

The rest of the group all looked at Julia. _This is what you get for wanting to be the hero,_ she thought. “I have no idea,” she said. “But there’s nothing else to do here, so… let’s.”

It wasn’t exactly a rousing speech - she really needed to get better at those - but it seemed to work. They trooped up the path to the gate, which was actually, on closer examination, more of a door.Specifically it was - 

“Is that the door to the Cottage?” Plum asked. “How did that get here?”

“How did any of this get here?” Kady asked. 

Alice caught Julia’s eye, and Julia knew they were thinking the same thing. The World Seed was supposed to have been safe in Fillory, but somehow it had been activated.

She should have been nervous about that, too, but it was a whole new world to explore. Who wouldn’t be excited about that?She grabbed Penny’s hand, squeezing it as she grinned, and he gave a reluctantly fond smile back. “Guess we’re gonna knock on that door?” 

“Why not?”

Kady stepped up to the door - even floating on whatever high this place was giving them all, she’d put herself in front of the group - but before she could raise her first, the door swung open, she broke into a teary smile, and the man behind it pulled her into his arms.

“Uh,” Plum said after a moment of them all trying not to stare. She slid closer to Penny’s side.“Professor, is that… um, is she kissing… you?”

“That,” Penny said, “is a long story.”

“You guys have a lot of those, don’t you?”

Kady pulled out of the kiss, and now Julia could see that, yes, it was the Penny of Timeline 40 standing there, though the difference was so slight it was hard to see it. He was back in his usual colorful fashions, though there was something odd about the cut of the clothes, and it was only when his eyes were on Kady - or when she felt her own Penny’s hand tighten around hers - that she thought _it shouldn’t be hard to tell the difference._

Penny 40 finally looked away from Kady. “Hey, guys,” he said.“Julia, Alice.”He nodded to them, then grinned at his doppleganger. “Nice shirt.And, uh, you are?” That was for Plum, who still looked like she was wondering if they’d slipped something in her drink.

“Uh, Plum,” she said. “Traveler. I brought them here.”

“She’s my student,” Penny - was she really going to have to call him Penny 23? - said. “Kind of a protege.”

“Not really, no.”

“Well alright.” Penny 40 grinned around at all of them, though his expression kept softening on Kady. “Welcome to… uh, we haven’t actually named the place yet, but, anyway.Welcome.”

“We?” Alice asked. “Do you mean… look, I don’t want to be rude, but the last we knew you were dead.”

“I was,” he agreed. “I… am, maybe?” His laugh was light and easy, like Julia had never heard from this version of Penny. Maybe not from her own either. “It’s complicated.I am dead, but I am also here.And no, before you ask, you guys are all perfectly alive.”He looked around at their shell-shocked expressions. “I’m sure this will all make more sense later.For now, why don’t you come in?”

Dazed, they passed through the door into what was definitely not the Physical Kids cottage. As they stepped around him, Julia heard Penny say, “I got this thing, see, and it took me where I was supposed to be.”

“Is that a metro card?” she heard Kady ask, but she kept moving and didn’t hear the answer.

Beyond the hedge, a garden stretched out, low fruit trees with thick, solid branches clustered in little groves with sitting nooks or ponds in the spaces between them. Winding paths led through the trees in all directions. They wandered along the paths, none of them paying much attention to where they were going, calling out to each other as they found a new, strange looking flower or a bridge over a stream.Alice immediately started indulging her weird new love of botany, pulling a notebook out of her pocket and drawing sketches. Plum flitted from place to place, getting the lay of the garden by Traveling to each corner.Penny found a picnic laid out, but when he reached for the bottle of wine sticking out of the basket, sparks lit up, some kind of magical force field pushing him back.“Guess it’s not dinner time,” he murmured.

Julia took off on her own after a few minutes, going deeper and deeper through the groves. Beneath the excitement of finding this strange place and the floaty bliss that seemed to come with it was a sense of urgency. She found herself looking more closely at the things she passed.Beneath a heavy old oak, she found a reading nook, with a hammock and a chest full of books. Further on was what looked like a little workshop, full of ordinary items, all of them cracked or broken in some way, but set out like the person who was going to fix them had just stepped away. One clearing was completely empty, the dirt covered by a smooth wooden floor, and in the corner, improbably, a boombox exactly like the one she’d had in eighth grade. 

There was no sense to the layout of the place, but there was an underlying logic to it anyway, a pattern she could feel more than see, as familiar to her as her own thoughts. Julia moved faster through the garden, turning corner after corner, sure there was something she was supposed to find up ahead.

And then she heard a noise, something between a scream and a sob, and very distinctly Alice, and she picked up her speed to as much as her ungainly body would allow. She stepped through another hedge into a space lit with tiny white lights, and found Alice holding someone in a tight embrace.

Her first, ridiculous thought was to apologize and give them space, but then it registered what she was seeing. Alice pulled away, tears running down her face like they hadn’t in all the months since the bonfire, but she was grinning, a huge smile that Julia had never seen on her before. And next to her - 

“Oh my god.” Julia reached up and felt the tears on her own face. “How is this - how - I don’t - “

He smiled. “Hi, Jules.”

**

_“They’re on Earth,” he said, and Penny nodded._

_But. “What if they weren’t?”_

_“What are you talking about?”_

_“Something that was mentioned in one of the Fillory books.” Penny started to roll his eyes, but he cut him off.“No, listen. Have you ever heard of the World Seed?”_

_“I saw something about it in an old book in the Poison Room,” Penny said, looking surprised._

_“Any way we could get that book to Earth?”_

***

The Cozy Horse had left them by an old brick wall. Eliot knew the wall couldn’t actually be old, since none of this had existed before a few hours ago, but it definitely looked old. Margo and Fen had taken forever to say goodbye to the horse, Margo looking more like a kid than Eliot would ever have imagined possible, while Josh hid behind her and muttered something about “horse allergies.” Then they’d gone through the door - which Eliot had pointedly not looked at too closely - and entered a long, narrow passage between hedge walls until they reached the back of an open courtyard paved with flagstones. There was a pool in the middle of the courtyard with water too blue to be natural, though there was none of the gross distinctive smell of chlorine, and beyond that, an enormous house, like a log cabin writ large, with wide picture-glass windows and an open door. Voices spilled out of the house.

“Oh! Our friends!” Fen said. 

“Or, crazy natives who want to kill us and roast us on that fire pit over there,” Margo said. Eliot checked - there was a fire pit, on the other side of the pool. 

Margo didn’t sound very invested in the threat. Whatever quirk of a stubborn personality had kept her from falling under the spell of this new world like the rest of them had faded the moment the Cozy Horse had bent down to let her climb aboard. She was grinning even now, swinging Josh’s hand in hers and looking around like the next artifact of her childhood fantasies might be hiding behind that tree over there.

“No, it’s our friends,” Fen said firmly. “I can hear their voices.I have very good ears.” Someone in the house called out something, a joke by the sound of it, and she tilted her head. “That’s Penny.”There was a laugh in response and she frowned.“That’s also Penny.”

“Or, maybe you should get your hearing checked,” Margo said, but she looked fond. “Alright, we going in?” 

Fen grabbed Margo’s free hand and tugged, winning a surprised look and then a grin from Margo as she, in turn, pulled Josh along. _Go Bambi,_ Eliot thought.

But after only a few steps, Margo looked back over her shoulder. “You coming, El?”

“In a minute,” he said. “I’m just going to… scout around. Look for those natives.”

“Uh-huh.” Margo gave him a look that said she didn’t believe a word of it, but then she laughed and let the other two drag her towards the house.

Left alone, Eliot closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. 

The scent of fruit trees blooming - peaches and plums - was heavy on the air.

“This better not be a fucking joke,” he said.

It wasn’t just the trees, though they were everywhere. It was the whole layout of the place.Eliot couldn’t have mapped the corner of Fillory they’d lived in for all those decades onto this place, and yet if he just let his eyes go a little out of focus, he could see it. That river he could barely hear rushing by on the other side of the house was the one where he’d taught Teddy to fish.The road leading up away from the courtyard to the north was the one they’d taken into the village every week for supplies. There was a garden over near the house, and it didn’t have any of the same things he’d grown at the mosaic - other than the fruit trees, none of the vegetation here was familiar - and yet something about the sight of it told him it was the same.

And there was the door, the wooden door that had never hung straight no matter how much they fussed with the hinges, the door he walked through every day for fifty years without a thought, the door that had held him trapped in his own mind, and now, the door that had led him to this place.

Eliot didn’t think about it. He couldn’t.He just turned and walked back through the hedge maze towards the door, and when he came to a branching path, he took it. 

It led him away through the orchard, the scent of peaches thickening, until he came to another clearing. And there was a man, standing on a stepladder to pluck the ripe fruit and place it in the basket on his hip. Eliot did not let himself think _that looks like Quentin._

The man climbed down and turned around. And then he saw Eliot and promptly tripped, spilling the peaches, because it absolutely _was_ Quentin.

“H-hi,” he said, open-mouthed.

“Hi,” Eliot said softly. He took a few steps closer, eyes dropping briefly to the peaches before jumping back to his face. “Arielle always did say you bruised half of whatever you brought back.”

Quentin smiled. “She was right.”

He was perfect, exactly the right mix of everything Eliot remembered and the little things he’d forgotten until this image was in front of him again. His hair was longer than it had been that day in the park that was the last time Eliot had really seen him, down past his shoulders and lit with blonde highlights in the sun. He wore strange clothes, not exactly like they’d had in Fillory in the past, but close enough, and as dull and tragically shapeless as anything Quentin had ever owned.There were faint lines around his mouth that Eliot didn’t remember and those dimples that he’d never been able to forget, and his eyes were - they were so soft.

“It’s alright, Eliot,” he said.

“Is it?” Eliot took a step closer, and another, until they were only a foot or so apart. “Can I - ?”

Quentin came closer too, stepping around the fallen peaches until he had to crane his neck to look up into Eliot’s face. “You can.”

Eliot reached out, very slowly, half expecting his hands to go right through Quentin’s shoulders like he was a ghost. But he wasn’t, he was solid and warm and real.He smiled as Eliot ran his hands slowly down his arms and back up, around his shoulders, pulling him in closer.

“I’m real,” he said, with so much understanding in his voice.

“Yeah.” Eliot slid one hand up until he could rest it on the nape of Quentin’s neck and reel him in. “Yeah, you are.”He ducked his head and buried his face in Quentin’s throat, breathing in the scent of him, feeling his hair against his cheek. Quentin’s hands slid carefully around his waist and gripped him back.“You are. Shit, you really are.”And he started to shake.

They stayed like that for a long time, and Eliot couldn’t say which of them was holding the other up. He thought it was Quentin, but when he finally pulled back so he could see that face, Quentin’s face that he thought he’d known perfectly but now couldn’t stop drinking in, marveling at what he hadn’t remembered, Q had tears on his cheeks and he gripped Eliot’s arms like he’d fall without them there. “I really missed you,” he said shakily.

“Me too.” Eliot freed one hand to wipe at his tears and then at Quentin’s, carefully brushing them away while Quentin smiled beneath his touch. “How, Q?”

“I, uh, I don’t really know?” Quentin laughed, and that was another thing that had haunted Eliot for months and yet was better than he’d remembered. “Or, I do, but I’m not sure I can explain it to someone who’s, um, you know - “

“Alive?” Eliot asked wryly.

“Well…” Quentin frowned. Eliot had remembered that expression perfectly, Quentin with puzzle. “Yes, but…”He leaned in conspiratorially.“Penny says we’re still dead, technically, but honestly? I think he really doesn’t know as much as he pretends he does.It’s a Librarian thing.”He made a face. “Or a Penny thing.”

Eliot grinned, blissfully happy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Well, it’s this world, you know.”

“The one I created two hours ago?”

“You created it?” Quentin raised his eyebrows. “Huh. I owe Penny ten bucks. I had my money on Julia finding the page.” He saw Eliot’s face and laughed, all those dimples, that joyful expression, how had Eliot even lived without this? “I’m sorry!”

“I will expect an extensive apology,” Eliot said loftily, deciding right then that Quentin never needed to know Alice had been the one to find the page. “So I created the world, and then you were… here?Just like that?”

“Not exactly. For one thing, time is sort of weird when you’re talking about a world that’s just being created, and it’s _super_ weird in the Underworld, so, we’ve been here since this morning but also for like, a year, maybe? That’s why, you know,” he waved a hand, “you created this place but we sort of built it.I mean, I built this part, obviously, Penny’s not much into orchards. His stuff is over that way somewhere.But it’s not like we _really_ built it, with magic or anything, it’s more like it became what we want - “

Eliot had to kiss him just to shut him up.

Several minutes later, Eliot pulled back and rested his forehead against Quentin’s, breathing slowly. “The point,” he said, “is that you’re here.”

“I’m here.” Quentin’s eyes were closed and his fingers were very tight around Eliot’s. “In the Underworld,” he said, “when you’re… ready to move on, I guess, you go to where you’re supposed to be.”

“And this is where you’re supposed to be?”

Quentin opened his eyes and looked up into Eliot’s. “This is where I’m supposed to be.”

***

_“So.”_

_“So.” Quentin faced the door. “And you’re sure - “_

_“Nope. Taking a risk here.”_

_“Right.” He glanced at Penny. A week or a year, whatever it had been in the Underworld, and he thought they might have finally become something like friends. “See you on the other side?”_

_“If this works.” Penny sounded sanguine about the whole thing, but Quentin knew that was a lie. Once Quentin walked through that door, Penny was going to have to find his own, with the metro card he’d stashed away, and hope whatever leadership the Underworld still had didn’t try to stop him._

_Quentin didn’t have that problem. After the last however-long it had been, the Underworld was going to be very happy to let him go._

_“Then I’ll - “ He paused, then turned back and wrapped his arms around Penny’s shoulders in a tight hug. “Let’s go find them,” he said softly, then pulled away._

_And stepped through the door._

***

“We can’t leave this world,” Penny explained to the group as they sat around the fire pit, roasting marshmallows and passing the bottles of wine back and forth, because the clouds of creative stuff out in the desert had yet to generate wine glasses. 

( _If you’d spent some time thinking about wine glasses,_ Penny had said, _we’d have them by now,_ and Quentin had argued, _that’s not how this works,_ and then they’d bickered like irritated siblings for several minutes until Eliot had patted Quentin’s head and reminded the rest of them that the _wine_ had generated and that was what mattered.)

“We don’t actually know that,” Quentin said, from his seat between Julia and Eliot. “We just know we can’t go back to Earth.Or Fillory, though I guess none of you can do that either.” A faintly sad look crossed his face, and Julia squeezed his hand.But the look didn’t last.“Oh, and we can’t go back to the Underworld, not that we’d want to do that anyway - “

“ _You_ definitely can’t,” Penny said, in a voice that promised a story.

“But we have this whole world to explore, and maybe others. Once Penny gets up the nerve to try to Travel off-world - “

“Excuse me if I don’t want to land on some planet and immediately become a corpse - “

“Yeah, let’s skip that whole scenario,” Kady said. She had her arms wrapped around one of Penny’s and hadn’t let go for hours. She looked up at him.“How about we just stay here for a while, okay?”

“Fine by me,” he murmured, leaning in to kiss her. Everyone else looked politely away.

“The rest of you, though,” Quentin said. “You can go back, if you want to.”

“To Earth?” Alice hadn’t meant to speak out loud, but now the entire circle was looking at her. “I just mean… I wasn’t sure, when we left.If we’d be going back.”

“You can go wherever you want to,” Quentin said. He met her eyes across the fire, looking maybe a little disappointed but not surprised. “And you can always come back.”

He’d come into the courtyard with Eliot earlier, just as the sky was dimming. Eliot’s arm had been around Quentin’s shoulders, Quentin leaning into his side, but when he’d spotted Alice he’d stepped away and come to give her another long, lingering hug. Alice had clung on to him, feeling like she had earlier that day, like she’d been given a gift she could never have expected or hoped for.He’d gone to sit with Eliot again after that, the two of them practically cuddling in front of the whole group, but every time their eyes met across the fire he’d given her that same warm, steadying smile.

So much of this corner of the world he’d created was unfamiliar to her, in a way she knew it wasn’t for Eliot. Eliot moved around like everything was where he’d expected it to be; he was at ease, like a man who had come home. Alice didn’t feel that here, no matter how beautiful this garden was.But there were parts of her here, scattered around - there was a room in the cabin decorated in the style of hers back at Brakebills, and there had been bacon in the picnic basket (Quentin had blushed when he handed it to her), and the lighting in the clearing where she’d first found her way back to him had been tinted like the inside of a Tesla Flexion, a place Alice had never been but where, she knew, Quentin had once promised another version of her that there was no world in which he didn’t love her.

She belonged here, in his world. Just maybe not at the center of it, not like Eliot.

She smiled at him across the fire. “I will come back,” she promised. “I just… there are things I left undone.”Fixing the circumstances for one, a project a certain botany professor might like to help her with. Alice found she didn’t hate that idea. And then there was the Library and she thought maybe, if Penny could spare her, Kady might want to come back and help with that.She didn’t hate that idea either.

“We’ll have to go back too,” Julia said, looking up at Penny - well, Penny 23, Alice supposed they’d have to call him that again. “This world is beautiful, Q, but I assume you didn’t think up an obstetrician who specializes in Traveler babies?”

“That was definitely not something I thought of,” Quentin said, and then, more softly, “I cannot believe you’re having a baby with Penny.”

“Hey, at least it’s that Penny,” Forty said. Alice wondered if maybe one of them might be willing to go by William.

Twenty-Three chose to ignore that. “Plum can take us back and forth,” he said.

“Oh, right, because I’m going to be your Uber, is it?” his former student asked.

Penny 40 laughed. “Welcome to being this group’s token Traveler,” he said. “If they ever ask you to rob a bank vault, say no.”

“A _bank vault_?”

“But we’ll come back too,” Julia promised. “Our baby will have a whole world to explore.”

“We’re staying,” Margo said. “Fen wants to be an explorer, and Josh is looking for any special plant life you might have. And we know both of them will get killed the second they’re out of sight if I don’t go with them.”

“That’s not fair,” Fen protested, though the effect was undercut by how she was lying, half-asleep, with her head on Margo’s knee. Apparently they didn’t have marshmallows on Fillory and she was in a sugar crash. 

“Two words,” Margo said dryly. “Dark King.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Josh admitted.

“Who’s the Dark King?” Quentin asked, and Eliot said, “A story for another time. Marshmallow?” and nearly shoved one of the sticks in Quentin’s mouth, leaving him mumbling indignantly.

It went on like that, well into the false night of a world so new it didn’t have a sun yet, just the expectation of its creators that there should be a starry night for friends to sit out under. Alice leaned back on her arms and listened to them, this group of friends and lovers and occasionally rivals who shouldn’t have all worked together, but who’d saved a few worlds, and each other, between them. 

They sounded different, she thought, than she’d ever heard them. They sounded happy.


End file.
